A Chapter Without A Title

( Originally Published 1944 )

Received by all men and by all rejected.

SO YOU'RE going into business. At least that is what this chapter is intended to do for you-put you into business whether you like it or not. And you're simply going to have to like it if you're going to be a writer. Of course, you might say, if that's the only way into the writing-for-money-cash-and-carrywordage-racket, I'm dropping the whole thing right now.

But wait, pal. Let me tell you this first I mean before you pitch me out of the window. I've never been in business. Every mortal thing I ever bought since Day One I bought for use or pleasure. Profit? Well, I know what the word means, but never experienced the sensation. I've worked in a bank, in news-paper offices, in movie studios. While I was getting so much a week they called it a wage. Then, when they moved me up five bucks, they payed me bi-weekly and called it a salary. Of course, during the five years I have worked for movie studios I have been one of the blessed and received neither wage nor salary. Movie pay is just a rake-off and is absolutely lacking any connection with merit or effort. Besides I didn't even have to work for those five years. That's why it's called a rake-off. It's the fifty-buck-a-week, highly-skilled, highly-specialized and highly-talented suckers who do the work in studios.

Once you're getting half a grand a week and up in a studio all you have to do is to have ideas. I always had too many.

So that's all I ever sold-my services to a bank, my services to half a dozen different newspapers, and my services to four of the major studios. Maybe I flatter myself. Maybe the only service I ever rendered each and all of these several public enemies was not to stick it out but, instead, to go seek some, any, material matter of paying homage to my healthy and instinctual preferences for a pint of beer and a wench. I can recommend both.

Also, almost by accident, I have sold forty full length novels, one book of short stories, four books about writing, over a thousand short stories, over a thousand articles and, though not so much of this and never under my own name, what has passed for verse.

In fact, in the matter of writing, my output has been so prodigious that in these days I instinctively think, when I remember it all, in terms of victory ships rolling down the slipways, or airplanes coming off the assembly lines, or machine-gun ammunition rolling merrily along in their millions atop a conveyor belt.

You all know that the business which turns out the most things at the lowest price makes dough. And yet though this most emphatically is not true of the writing business, I insist again, right in the middle of this disconcerting paradox, that writing is a business. Which led me at one time to reflect that though I had always been able to produce plenty quick and plenty cheap and always sell the stuff to boot, I must have been a pretty goddam lousy businessman all those years to let public-enemy publishers and editors get away with all they did. They got away with plenty.

From that reflection I was led inescapably to the next that I had better do something about it quick; learn all there was to know about the business, and set myself up good and proper as a one-man industrial plant with a suite (containing one chair only) of executive offices, a parking lot next door (large enough for my car alone), all sorts of olive-green high-gloss fireproof metal filing systems, and the like.

I got only half way. Yes, I did learn all about business, and at least part of what I learned I'm going to impart forthwith. But the reason why I never saw the thing through to its bitter end was that, above all else, in the course of my inquiries I was forced back to a conclusion that previously I had enjoyed by grace of instinct alone: that business is a most insufferable bore.

Now you can't afford to believe that business is a bore. Or, if you simply insist on believing it, at least don't do anything about it. Because if you do you will automatically exclude yourself from that sine qua non of a Chamber of Commerce approach that I am insisting on (but not mentality, for God's sake!) and the dividends it will deliver to your door per the U. S. mails.

Everything I did was wrong. And think, friend, just think, of what I might have achieved for myself if I have been able to sell in the open market the best part of ten million words doing everything wrong, if only I had known how to do everything right.

The nature of business is an internecine struggle. "Internecine" means "very deadly" or "mutually slaughterous and destructive of life," deriving from the Latin internecare which, in its simplest translation into English, means-To KILL. All honest business men will readily admit that business can best be likened to warfare. It is almost too elementary to state, but I shall state it, that only the fit survive. Now what is "fit"? Is it a word that is objective and absolute, immutable and precise? It is not. It is comparative, relative, and variable with time, place, and the weather in the streets.

All this is leading to a good deal more, but mean-while let me say here only that that is why you and I and all the rest of us except the Big Name people have everything from dozens to thousands of perfectly excellent manuscripts packed tight in drawers, cup-boards, and trunks, yellowing with age, Unsold! Out two dozen times and back two dozen times. Why? And they are perfectly good stuff, absolutely suitable for the mediums we had in mind when we wrote them.

Have you ever stopped to think of the aggregate unsold wordage turned out each year by the estimated sixty-thousand-to-one-quarter-of-a-million successful and unsuccessful writers throughout this country alone? Even astronomical figures, which are meaning-less, would not cope with this monstrous aggregate. So, then, why? Because the story is too slow to start, or the ending pretty tricky but not quite tricky enough, or the plot too loosely knit, or a character not altogether credible? Nothing of the sort; at least, nothing of the sort for hundreds of stories I have written myself and literally thousands I have read of friends and professional associates that never did get transmuted into print and exchanged for dough! The fault, dear Brutus . . . Well, to be perfectly honest, even if you are a good writer in addition to being a good business man, you'll still get a certain percentage of rejection slips. Only the Big Names don't get any at all, and that's because they've got two things to sell against your one a manuscript as well as a name; and please be informed right here categorically that the name is infinitely more valuable than the manuscript.

That, in brief, is what, in business, is known as competition. And if in every "normal" year of business in this country tens of thousands of plumbers, service stations, spare parts wholesalers and retailers, candy stores, clothing stores, drug stores, book stores (particularly book stores!), and every other sort and manner and style of business go out of business due to mere lack of business, or, otherwise expressed, due to there being, for the business available, just too, too many plumbers, service stations, spare parts wholesalers and retailers, candy stores, clothing stores, drug stores, and book stores, then how in hell and why in hell should you think that you, who are in the business of writing, should not be faced with this identical situation! Because you are, and the quicker you face it the better.

And now, before adverting to the matter of business in its impure essence, let me digress a few moments to point out to you a clearly-visible and shockingly-transparent situation you are in. We'll not begin by imagining you own the Saturday Evening Post or Good Housekeeping or Better Homes and Gardens. That's too much to imagine. But it isn't too much to imagine that you should inherit fifty thousand bucks because lots of people often do inherit as much as that from long-lost uncles, or come into sums like that and more in all sorts of devious ways. (If you're a dame you might have been smart enough to have married a guy who opened up an aviation-accessory plant in the garage at the back of the yard sometime around the beginning of the war. Within a year he had a fine little plant near the tracks and a sheaf of subcontracts in his strong box. Pretty soon, whether on a cost-plus or outright basis, he had enough equipment and machinery all bought by the government, together with cash profits earned and accruing, to be worth a charge of mental cruelty for a nice community property settlement.)

Anyhow, I'm trying to get you into fifty thousand dollars worth of dough. Believe me, it can be done. I can't get you the Saturday Evening Post, nor Esquire, nor McCall's. But I can get you fifty grand. Take Martin Flavin. Ever since he was a mere kid back in the last century he had an itch for writing paper and the sprawling over it of dialogue in the shape of plays. But at the business of writing he wasn't (yet) very good. In place of the business of writing paper he switched to the business of wall-paper. He made a rip-roaring success of it. After thirty years he had his fifty grand and did a mad dash for Cannel where he set himself up in business again, and again with writing-paper, the choice of his youth. He began to write novels. He didn't give a damn whether he sold them or not, because the wall-paper had seen to it that there'd always be a roof over his head, good food, good liquor, and what goes with all that. Today he's a best-selling novelist.

That's what Martin Flavin chose to do with his fifty grand. But I've got something else in mind for you. I want you to start a magazine. Not an Esquire, nor a Collier's, nor a Liberty. You need all of a million for that. But let's say you live in Ohio. Well, what's wrong with Ohio? It's got the best part of eight million population, which is almost what the State of California has. All right, so you live in California. Note that I don't say Idaho, Iowa, or North Dakota, because you're going to need about eight million population. (And if you don't live in California why don't you hurry and come here?)

The idea behind all this is to get you into an editorial chair which is equally the boss' chair. Most editors are not the boss. But I need you to be both.

And now you have to set about taking a series of steps most of which, as our society is constructed and as our honesty is construed, are honest; and a few which are not.

You have to think of a name. That's easy. Call it California Homes and Gardens. Next get yourself an editor, who, while you are negotiating with printers and paper houses and wholesale distributors, will get himself a photographer (to go and snapshot snazzy bathrooms, natty kitchens, and pretteh rose gardens), a circulation manager, and a couple of willing secretaries. Let it roll, and get it on the news-stands by offering everybody a generous deal all around. You are going to lose thousands on this first issue so you may as well lose a few thousands more. Plug it on the radio, advertise it in the press, employ (in "normal" times) a hundred adult dopes to go around canvassing subscriptions from door to door, and a thousand school kids, likewise (only you never pay a school kid as much as you pay an adult, although the school kid may do just as well as the adult, or better).

If you're a stupe, and your editor too, you'll quick lose those fifty grand. But I am presuming on your not being a stupe at all. All right, so your first issue is OK. You get yourself a terrific cover with a pretty housewife in six colors in a million-dollar kitchen, only you give something to her clothes and her appearance and her very friendly smile which makes the public think it might be she or the woman next door. Also there's sex. That was the clever artist you employed. He charged you a thousand bucks for that first cover, but it was worth it, for not only did he contrive a Cover Girl for you who was obviously married (wedding ring on her finger), had kids (there are two sitting at the kitchenette table she's leaning over, pouring golden custard into tall purple crystal glasses), and goes to church every Sunday (small silver crucifix hanging from a beautiful silver filigree chain around her neck), but in addition, despite the kiddies being around ten or twelve years of age, she looks not a day older than twenty-five, has a lush, symmetrical, clearly-discernible bosom that would flatter a top-flight Harlem chorus girl, an irresistible waistline, long thighs, faultless legs, a swan-like neck, and eyes, ears, nose, lips, and throat that Rodin could not surpass. (You'll admit that's cheap at a thousand bucks).

So all goes well, because the wholesale distributors report a pretty fair sale and only about seventy-five per cent of the number of copies you printed have to have their covers ripped off at the month's end and the contents sent to be pulped by the paper mills for a gross return of about four dollars a ton.

Meanwhile all sorts of advertising agencies have tentatively, and without any show of enthusiasm, inquired what your advertising rates might be. The important thing is that they have inquired, and the guy you employed as advertising manager now' has some work to do. Besides, a few dozen people have written in from up and down the State saying how much they like the first issue; that (a) they had often thought of bringing out just such a magazine as that them-selves; and (b) would you print another story by Sarah Gottanitch because they know she's a realist because what happened to the heroine has happened to them dozens of times.

You're on your way. Although it irks you plenty you pay the artist another thousand bucks for another cover; your editor has already sent Sarah Gottanitch a frantic telegram demanding another five thousand words (perhaps even at five cents a word), and everybody around the office is feverishly trying to think of what prize might go best right now for some sort of freak promotion you're trying to get under way. No one can think up a damned thing. So you offer everybody in the office a prize for the best prize. They all go home at night and offer their kids a prize if they can think up something that'll win them the prize the boss has offered for the best suggestion for a prize.

Second issue goes over much better, with a bigger sale, some (very little, but some) paid advertising, two contests, a cross-word puzzle (housekeeping words only), an acrostic (gardening words only), with cash prizes offered for all four. The editor's wife thought of that one.

And so it goes until six months later you have an established medium on the market in which Camel, Chesterfield, and Lucky Strike have a full-page ad under contract for the next three years; the local rail-roads are all in, a half-dozen national health-foods; all the leading woman's hygiene paraphernalia; gardening tools, swimming-pool contractors, newfangled paints, and everything you can think of including, if you're lucky, Coca Cola!

All right, you haven't made a fortune, and perhaps you never will. But you've got back your losses on your first few issues, and you're in the saddle now for a happy-come-lucky thousand bucks a week net, at least.